After watching Lost the other day I was taken by all the similarities that the island of Lost and its characters have with an IT company.

Jack Sheppard as the CEO

A solid runner who came up in the ranks starting with the code. He’s a hands on type manager who’s not afraid to get down and dirty with the code. He makes good judgement calls though he’s sometimes too conservative and always places too much faith in his employees, except the shady types. His skills really shine as the fixer upper. Data loss, server failures, security breaches, office politics, whatever. Any crisis you bring, he’ll take it head on even if it costs him his marriage. He still likes to think of himself as the coder so he finds it hard to accept his position as a leader and the one who makes decisions.

John Locke the Vice President

At heart, John’s a good man who strives to do the right thing. He’s got the right skills and saved the day quite a number of times. However, his fascination with the new and unknown coupled with well-meaning but frustrating indecisiveness and general bad judgement spell disaster. He’s vice president because he could come in handy at certain times of crisis but as the captain in charge would be more than a disaster. He’s made more than one bad decision that nearly cap-sized the whole company. They want to give him a golden parachute but can’t. He’s also led quite a few promising recruits right off the cliff because they simply took John at face value.

Sayid the Chief of Security

Former black hat now applying all his skills for the good of the company. Sayid comes from a developing country where his brilliance quickly earned him a scholarship abroad to one of the prestigious Western schools. However, he gave in to the dark side of cracking and hacking because he thought he was fighting for the right cause, against establishment. However, weary and shook up from his early days, he’s hung up the black hat and traded it in for the white one.

Kate Austen the Senior Developer

Kate definitely has the skills to pay the bills and knows about all kinds of stuff, in fact a lot of stuff she shouldn’t know, the problem is that nobody knows anything about her credentials or her past. Her attractiveness and natural sexiness also creates all kind of office turmoil amongst the males. Though female and very feminine, her coding skills firmly keep her “one of the guys”.

Hurley the Junior Developer

Nobody really knows what he’s good for but everybody likes him. He tries to help in little ways but still has a long way to go before people can entrust him with projects. However, he’s good people and has some good ideas.

Sawyer the Consultant

A total mystery as to how he got his contract but the company’s stuck with him. Always trying to sell more of his services to the company at exorbitant prices, he does still manage to prove his worth when the going gets tough. Despite looking like a burly version of a grunge band vocalist, he knows how to code and came up the hard way with little to no credentials. Unemployable, unmanageable, and hated by co-workers he still manages to woo the ladies with that sometimes vulnerable look and careless smile.

Charlie the Web Designer

Free spirit and nice guy. Also a great designer but some claim his best days are long behind him. The trouble coders have with him is that he puts his nose into the development side where it clearly doesn’t belong and can even sabotage the project. Things could be better if he simply stuck to design and do something about his drug habit.

Survivors as the Company

The merger happened like a bolt of lightning. Suddenly they were part of a new company. Only a select few survived the hostile merger and now the survivors need to piece their lives back together.

The Others as the Parent Company

Nobody knows who the hell the “others” are. Just that they show up when they shouldn’t and randomly poach the best talent and kill the ones deemed useless. They’re scraggly-looking, ruthless and generally refuse to acknowledge subsidiary employees as human beings.

The Dharma Project as Stock Holders

These people obviously have power but not much is known about them aside from the fact that they provide the resources needed to keep the company going in the form of care packages dropped from the sky. Although, they are nominally running the show, they’re absolutely useless when survivors really need help.

The Island

The island is so much like a typical IT company. It’s small but obviously important to the world and there are all kinds of people involved in different subsidiaries scattered across the domain. Too bad that there isn’t really any cohesion aside from the fact that all of them are in the same geographic region.